Concerned United Birthparents

The CUB logo depicts a mother bear
and her cub, symbol of both power and nurturance.

Founded in Massachusetts
in 1976, Concerned United Birthparents (CUB) is currently headquartered
in Encinitas, California and has 10 chapters and over 400 members
around the United States. Its original mission was “to provide
support for birthparents who have relinquished a child to adoption;
to provide resources to help prevent unnecessary family separations;
to educate the public about the life-long impact on all who are
touched by adoption; and to advocate for fair and ethical adoption
laws, policies, and practices.” A 2003 revision of this statement
formally extends CUB’s supportive mantle to cover “all
family members separated by adoption” rather than birth
parents alone.

CUB has offered vital organizational resources and a political
voice chiefly to those birth mothers who felt most disempowered
in the era before the sexual revolution normalized premarital heterosexuality
and Roe v. Wade made abortion legal: young, unmarried white
women whose middle-class families considered their out-of-wedlock
pregnancies a source of terrible shame and moral failure. Many were
packed off to maternity homes in the 1950s and 1960s, where they
waited out their “confinements” in isolation and loneliness
and then surrendered healthy newborns to childless couples under
policies of confidentiality
and sealed records. These infant placements were in great demand
and often conformed to matching,
which aimed to replicate nature so closely that natal relatives
were made to disappear altogether. This kind of adoption promised
to permanently solve two problems at once: infertility
and illegitimacy.

CUB came into existence at precisely the moment when this promise
was no longer convincing. Members were inspired by search
and reunion pioneers among adult adoptees, particularly Jean
Paton, founder of Orphan Voyage, and Florence Fisher, of the Adoptees’
Liberty Movement Association (ALMA). At the same time, the second
wave of feminism was forcefully pursuing reproductive rights and
arguing that “the personal is political.” Although white
feminists were more closely identified with the struggle for safe
and legal abortion than with the protection of women’s childbearing
rights, the logic and rhetoric of reproductive choice encompassed
birth mothers, at least in theory. Why should women be pressured
to give up their children forever simply because they were unmarried,
or young, or poor, or without adequate support? Didn’t equality
require the freedom to decide when to have children as well as when
not to have them?

Lee Campbell, a banker’s wife, placed a personal ad in the
Boston Globe, hoping that others who had surrendered children
would reply. The result was a meeting at a Cape Cod church in July
1976, and a new organization was born. The women who attended came
together out of personal need. They did not all share an ideological
commitment to either women’s or children’s rights and
frequently disagreed on matters other than the suffering caused
by having given up a child. Yet they discovered they had a lot in
common, just as members of feminist consciousness-raising groups
did at the time. Gradually, their shared experience of surrendering
children under extreme pressure evolved from a personal complaint
into a subject of social analysis and a matter of social justice.

“Birthmother” was the term they coined to describe
themselves. They considered it a compromise of sorts between “natural
mother,” prevalent at the time, and “biological mother,”
which many adoptive parents preferred but CUB members found insultingly
mechanical. The term’s emphasis on birth reclaimed without
apology an important place in an adoption process that had too often
rendered them invisible and irrelevant. In addition to Campbell,
other CUB pioneers included Mary Anne Cohen, Susan Darke, Gail Hanssen,
Kathy Leahy, Joanne McDonald, and Sandy Musser. (Musser later became
a celebrated and controversial figure as the first search consultant
to go to jail. She was convicted on thirty-five counts of fraudulently
obtaining confidential records and spent four months in federal
prison in 1993 and 1994.) Carole Anderson joined CUB two years after
its founding and became one of the group’s most important
theoreticians. These women articulated an adoption
narrative that was empowering but also full of pain and frustration.
Their feelings about the permanence of biological kinship were heartfelt,
and so were their views about the devastating, long-lasting effects
of surrender on parents and children.

This was a far more ambivalent view of adoption than the sunny picture
prevalent between 1940 and 1970, and it revived themes that had
a long history: that natal families should be preserved whenever
possible and that adoption was extremely risky, unwise, and damaging.
Adoption, these women suggested, was not a choice, but proof that
they had been deprived of choice. Surrender was a product of material
deprivation, social stigma, and political powerlessness rather than
a voluntary act.

At a time when feminists emphasized the common plight of all women,
CUB’s analysis exposed cracks in the gender consensus even
as it revealed changing demographic patterns among birth mothers
themselves. Married women who occupied privileged class positions
were most likely to be adoptive mothers, whereas women without money
were punished for their poverty and girls from middle-class families
were ostracized for their premarital sexual activity with pressure
to give up their babies. A majority of birth mothers before World
War II were married women, but statistical analyses have shown that
by the mid-1960s, single women had taken their place. Class privilege
divided these two categories of women. CUB represented the latter.

The consequences of adoption for children were as negative as they
were for mothers, according to CUB. Adoptees were destined to live
without crucial knowledge of their genetic origins and family background,
and were disadvantaged by growing up in families where they did
not resemble their relatives or “fit in” in other ways.
Adoptive parents might provide love and care, and these were precious
resources in cases where children had been abandoned by chaotic
and dysfunctional natal families. But in most cases, CUB members
believed, adoption could not compensate for children’s loss
of essential, natural connections.

This suggested that family preservation was CUB’s top priority.
CUB never opposed adoption outright, but its argument was that the
vast majority of adoptions could and should be prevented. This echoed
a position staked out by professionals and policy-makers involved
in placing-out and social
welfare early in the twentieth century. Instead of adoption services,
vulnerable young families should be given the support they needed
to overcome their challenges and stay together. Ironically, CUB
emphasized family preservation at just the moment when the American
welfare state was beginning to contract under effective attack by
the right. The expansive safety net they envisioned might have been
an alternative to surrender for those women who placed children
mainly for economic reasons. But that vision did not survive the
Reagan revolution. Recent welfare reform policies have concentrated
simultaneously on decreasing out-of-wedlock births and promoting
heterosexual marriage as anti-poverty measures. But family preservation
programs have been decisively subordinated to policies emphasizing
faster terminations of parental rights and adoptive placements.

CUB began as a support group, reaching out to new members with
a newsletter, the CUB Communicator. It also attracted a
great deal of mainstream media attention from newspapers, women’s
magazines, and television. Lee Campbell, CUB’s first president,
made four appearances on the popular “Donahue” talk
show, for instance. But the first time she was interviewed, by a
Boston television station, she was hidden in shadows, evidence of
how difficult it was even for committed activists to go public with
their stories. Lorraine Dusky, author of the 1979 memoir, Birthmark,
was told by other birth mothers that they could not bring themselves
to purchase copies of the book even though they wanted to read it.
Embarrassment that cashiers might believe they were “one of
them” was more than they could bear. Coming out as a birth
mother was still cause for severe disgrace.

It was in this judgmental atmosphere that CUB mobilized to promote
adoption reform. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the group cooperated
with other organizations interested in ending secrecy and promoting
search and reunion,
including Adoptees’ Liberty Movement Association (ALMA). More
recently, it has worked with Bastard
Nation. CUB members testified at some of the earliest hearings
about open records in state legislatures around the country and
before the U.S. Congress. Many members of the organization believe
that openness is preferable to secrecy in cases where adoption is
unavoidable, and the organization went on record in favor of open
adoptions in its early years. But it withdrew support after seeing
evidence that adopters were reneging on their agreements, most of
which are not legally enforceable. CUB members worry that “openness”
may simply be a new way to pressure vulnerable girls and women into
surrender and make adoption more palatable.

CUB made good on its critical view of adoption and its defense
of family preservation by sponsoring a number of programs that aimed
to keep young mothers and newborns together through practical help
with housing and jobs. In 1978, CUB was also involved in establishing
the American Adoption Congress, an umbrella group representing individuals,
search organizations, and others devoted to adoption reform.

CUB is still largely identified with the cause of birth mothers.
The fact that large numbers of unmarried mothers today keep their
babies proves that the stigma of illegitimacy
has been reduced very dramatically in recent decades. But birth
mothers’ stories still evoke shock and condemnation in a culture
that cannot forgive women who surrender children, whether their
decisions were made freely or under pressure. In comparison, birth
fathers have attracted little notice.

Now almost thirty years old, CUB’s recent activities suggest
that the group hopes to advocate effectively for a new and different
generation of birth parents.
There have been efforts to incorporate more men, publicize their
stories of search and
reunion, and address their needs. Even in the twenty-first century,
however, men have not yet made the dramatic transition from paralyzed
privacy to public engagement that CUB pioneered for the women who
first gave life to children and then had to live with the pain of
giving them up and living without them.